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Will Ramsay, hair slicked back in the no-muss, no-fuss mode of the overly frequent flyer (he got off the plane from London just a few hours before, after having just been in New York; at some point not so long before, it was Delhi, Hong Kong and Singapore) took a few moments one afternoon this week to do something he normally doesn’t: sit still.

It wouldn’t last long. Ramsay’s the founder and CEO of the Affordable Art Fair, a network of low-cost marketplaces for art the world over that now numbers 17. There’s one in New York, one in Singapore, ones in Maastricht, Milan and Stockholm. And with the opening of Love Art on Thursday at the Direct Energy Centre, add Toronto to the list.

“But we couldn’t call it that here because someone else has the trademark,” sighed Ramsay, a soft-spoken, cheery Scotsman whose grandfather just happened to command the Allied forces on D-Day. “So Love Art it is.”

The Toronto edition, name notwithstanding, nonetheless carries the Affordable Art Fair ethos: prices must be marked on all works (“there’s no point getting excited about something only to find you can’t possibly afford it,” Ramsay said) and there’s a quota per booth on pieces over $5,000. Along with it comes an explicit encouragement to offer pieces that fall well below that threshold.

The idea has been something of a hit. Around him at the Direct Energy Centre, white cubicles flagged with hot pink signs stood empty, waiting to be filled with art from all over: Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, London, Houston and, in one surprising case, Uganda.

Ramsay has carved a niche in an increasingly crowded spectrum of global events that cater to what many seem to agree is a growing complement of people willing to buy art but less willing, it would seem, to do the legwork. With Love Art, Toronto now has four art fairs; in bigger centres like New York, a month doesn’t go by without at least one; in March alone, there are more than a dozen.

Art fairs are three or four-day affairs, at most, stuffing places like glum convention centres or temporary high-culture tent cities with art, cheek by jowl, in the art-world equivalent of a trade fair.

Art fairs come at a time that stand-alone private galleries are in transition themselves and it’s not a coincidence. As more buying and selling takes place at fairs, storefront galleries open to casual passersby seem almost like quaint throwbacks. They are casualties of the increasingly serious business of art, here and elsewhere, as gallerists abandon walk-by traffic and migrate to various cities’ fringes for larger spaces, the better to entertain serious buyers.

Here, in Toronto, Jessica Bradley, one of the country’s top dealers, abandoned her Dundas West storefront for an warehouse space in an industrial district near Dupont St. and Davenport Rd. Clint Roenisch, who for years held a prime spot on Queen St. W. near Shaw St., decamped this month for light industrial St. Helen’s Ave., down the street from a Value Village and next door to the Daniel Faria Gallery, which had opened there two years before.

And then, there are the fairs, jam-packed buying frenzies that draw an elite convoy of buyers around the globe in their wake. At the top end, Miami Art Basel and Frieze, in London and New York, aim squarely at the global 1 per cent, drawing private jets and their moneyed cargo for whom adding a few million dollars of art to their collection is a weekend well spent, right down to Ramsay’s Affordable empire and everything in between (besides his Affordable Art Fair brand, Ramsay also runs the Pulse fairs, midprice range adjuncts to fairs like Basel in Miami and Frieze New York, which opens this week).

But the Affordable brand is Ramsay’s bread and butter. “We’re totally optimistic and completely in the dark,” said Michelle Williams, a gallery owner from Houston, Tex., who trucked her wares to Toronto on the strength of the Affordable Art Fair brand. She had never been to Toronto before, she said, “but we trust them.”

Indeed, Ramsay’s event is accessible, broad-based and, everywhere except Toronto, explicitly promises a universally desired quality: it’s cheap. “Take home some art,” reads one bus shelter ad, showing a young man riding his bicycle with a pair of framed artworks tucked under his arm wrapped in pink tape. The ad promises hundreds of works ranging from $100 to $10,000.

It’s affordable not just for buyers. “Cost,” said Alison Milne, a young Toronto gallerist, when asked why she chose Love Art as her first ever art fair buy in. The booth, at about $5,000 for the four-day event, is less than half the price of Art Toronto, Canada’s main fair held each October. And that counts.

That’s not the only attractive aspect, though. “We’re a small gallery,” said Anthea Baxter-Page, Milne’s gallery director. “It’s a good place for us to get our feet wet.” Milne nodded. “And I like its approach,” said Milne. “It’s really for people who want to buy something they love. It’s comfortable, somehow.”

“A lot of people are intimidated by buying art,” Ramsay says. “The typical scenario for a lot of people, I think, is you look through the gallery window, and it’s an all-white space with high ceilings and concrete floors. There’s nobody in there, typically, but the gallery attendant and you think, ‘Oh, this is going to be difficult.’ I’ve tried to democratize that process and reach beyond people who already go to galleries.”

Ramsay’s right, in that there’s something comforting in recasting the art-buying experience into the familiar context of a shopping mall. But it also lessens the experience in material ways. Art galleries, or the best of them, are not boutiques. At their best, they present impeccably curated experiences that give a sense of breadth and depth to an artist’s work. The commodity aspect of art lurks somewhere in the background, present but marginalized, usually, to a typewritten price list placed discreetly on a side table.

It was just this kind of experience that sent Ramsay searching. Throughout university, he would go to galleries out of pure interest but found himself ignored or regarded with quiet disdain as a gawker without buying power. “Galleries aren’t much good at public education,” he says.

His first attempt to address what he thought was a glaring need was to open Will’s Art Warehouse, his own highly informal gallery with an open-door policy and, of course, affordable art. “Galleries tend to tell their customers, ‘This is important and you should care about it,’” he says. “I wanted to say, ‘Here’s what we have: you decide.’”

Some years later, at Love Art, a ruthless transparency reigns, from prices marked on the wall to a hard cap for any one work of $10,000 (“affordable” is in the eye of the beholder but, in the global art market, $10,000 is relative peanuts).

Whatever level you’re at, art fairs recast art works, sometimes reductively. Instead of seeing them as a part of a committed practice, works become trinkets or baubles, like a new iPhone or pair of shoes. Nonetheless, depth of experience isn’t for everyone and, Ramsay says, a remarkable few.

“Yes, it’s not the perfect forum for reflecting on an artist’s practice, as you might in a museum or a solo show,” he says. “But it does make it accessible. And it makes it fun.”

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